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Academic Careers

Proposed Law Would Require Institutions to Disclose Alumni Outcomes

By Beryl Benderly
15 October, 2012

We at Science Careers have long urged graduate programs to track and make public their graduates’ and postdocs’ career outcomes so that people considering Ph.D. programs and postdoc appointments can make informed choices. Recent studies from the National Academies and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) include similar recommendations. Now two U.S. senators, Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), have also joined forces to require institutions to reveal to prospective students and their parents what kind of return they may expect on their investments of time and money.

The “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act,” which the senators are co-sponsoring, would require colleges to provide data about graduates’ earnings. As presently written, the bill applies only to undergraduate degrees. As economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University in Athens writes in Bloomberg, it’s not at all clear that income is necessarily the best measure of educational outcome because the specific fields that students pursue and career choices they make also greatly influence their earnings.

This bipartisan effort could, however, be a significant first step toward making educational institutions more accountable to those they ostensibly serve. Once a requirement for tracking student outcomes were in place, it probably could be relatively easily extended to include graduate programs.

The bill, of course, is nowhere near becoming law. Vedder, furthermore, predicts that “the higher-education establishment will fight” any such requirement in order to safeguard elite colleges’ cachet. Many graduate programs that recruit Ph.D. students and postdocs on the basis of faculty members’ need for low-cost laboratory and instructional workers rather than on the basis of the career opportunities later available to graduates have also shown strikingly little interest in publicizing alumni outcomes.

As the reports from the National Academies and NIH propose, another approach to getting out information about graduate programs would be for funding agencies to require universities to report on the fate of the students and postdocs supported on their grants. To date, however, the largest agencies have shown no inclination to do so.

Real progress on this issue therefore lies in the future. Still, it’s encouraging that a serious conversation has at least begun.